Don’t let a black hole eat your house!

• Photo by Kevin O’Mara

Foreign Policy has compiled a list of the Ten Worst Predictions for 2008. You’ll be happy to hear that physics has made the cut!

“There is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies such as miniature black holes, strangelets and deSitter space transitions. These events have the potential to fundamentally alter matter and destroy our planet.” —Walter Wagner, LHCDefense.org

Scientist Walter Wagner, the driving force behind Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is making his bid to be the 21st century’s version of Chicken Little for his opposition to the world’s largest particle accelerator. Warning that the experiment might end humanity as we know it, he filed a lawsuit in Hawaii’s U.S. District Court against the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which built the LHC, demanding that researchers not turn the machine on until it was proved safe. The LHC was turned on in September, and it appears that we are still here.

Admittedly, FP didn’t get it quite right — as loyal readers know, it’s something of an exaggeration to say that the LHC was “turned on in September.” Protons circulated around the ring, but there were no collisions, and there won’t be until later this year. Still, they were right about the wrongness. The LHC is perfectly safe.

The other predictions were also amusing. Here’s my favorite:

“If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” —William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006

Weekly Standard editor and New York Times columnist William Kristol was hardly alone in thinking that the Democratic primary was Clinton’s to lose, but it takes a special kind of self-confidence to make a declaration this sweeping more than a year before the first Iowa caucus was held. After Iowa, Kristol lurched to the other extreme, declaring that Clinton would lose New Hampshire and that “There will be no Clinton Restoration.” It’s also worth pointing out that this second wildly premature prediction was made in a Times column titled, “President Mike Huckabee?” The Times is currently rumored to be looking for his replacement.

Of course, asking Bill Kristol to predict the future is like asking Rod Blagojevich to head a good-government task force. Here’s my prediction: Kristol will continue to say dumb things, next year and far into the future. And get paid handsomely for doing so.

In honor of NASA’s current round of the astronaut selection process:

(from Dinosaur Comics. If you’re interested, there’s also a t-shirt.)

I first came across Second Life at a demonstration session put on by one of Linden Lab’s gurus at SciFoo camp in 2006. Since then I’ve heard about it occasionally, but was recently reminded about the details of how it works by Sean’s post on his talk in Second Life. This is all well and good and, although I’m not currently spending time in Second Life myself, I can see that there is real educational potential there, particularly with people like Rob involved.

But sometimes things get just plain silly! The Guardian is carrying a story of a real life couple who got divorced because the man was carrying on a platonic relationship with another woman in Second Life (I guess I should mention that his avatar also slept with a prostitute avatar also). So, first, while some things, like attending a talk by a cosmologist, may be almost as good in Second Life as in real life, I’m guessing sex isn’t one of them because it lacks the whole, you know, you getting laid part! Second, if you wanted to misbehave with a non-human toy form, put together from basic building blocks, you might as well make yourself a Lego partner – at least you could touch that.

Via Greg Laden, apparently originating at Fark.com: the candidates as trains.

There’s an old chestnut in astronomy — “Galaxies are like people. They’re only normal until you get to know them.” I thought it might be due to Sandy Faber, but decided to execute some google-fu to see if I could track down the provenance of the quote.

It turns out that the internet thinks there are lots of ways that galaxies are like people:

Galaxies are like people: the better you get to know them, the more peculiar they often seem. (from the always awesome Sydney van den Bergh)

Galaxies are like people. Thanks to gravity, they like living in groups.

Spiral galaxies are like people: they fray as they age.

Galaxies are like people. They grow when they’re young and stop growing when they settle into adulthood.

Galaxies are like people: they depend on both genetics and environment. (also from Sydney)

Galaxies are like people: they are born, they live and they die.

These are actually all pretty decent analogies, but I have a feeling we haven’t even begun to tap the potential of this framework. “Spiral galaxies are like people: most have two arms.” “Galaxies are like people. They grow in mass as they age.” “Galaxies are like people. Sometimes they eject gas when they’ve eaten too much.”

However, people are not so much like galaxies, only turning up one hit:

Great people are like galaxies. Their hearts are big black holes pulling everything in.

I can’t figure out if that’s supposed to be a good or bad thing.

So I’m sitting in my office doing physics, with part of me distracted by the LHC, and another part keeping an eye on the Guardian‘s live coverage of the football match between Croatia and England. This involves a team of commentators who occasionally bring up the contents of some of the emails they receive during the match. To get quoted, one usually needs to be funny, wacky, or both.

During the first half there was some banter about old computers, such as the Commodore 64 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. At half time, the following is reported:

Showing Off About Stuff dept: “All this talk of ZX Spectrums,” begins Steve Carbert, “reminds me of the time I wrote this really advanced basic program modelling the effects of superposed quantum states in a randomly fluctuating Hilbert Space and accidentally saved it on an old Barry Manilow cassette. Or was it the Troggs? But we digress. Can you give me more of a feel for how hostile the crowd is?” Yep, they’re quite quiet. Now can you tell me what the hell you are going on about? Fluctuating what? Eh?

HALF TIME: Croatia 0-1 England. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is that for the half. “Your commentary seems to be lacking any mention of Frank Lampard,” writes Kyle S. Karinen. Yes, it does, doesn’t it.

You can’t escape us – we’re everywhere!

Lonely heterosexual male physicists may wish to try their luck in New York City (via the consistently funny and frequently off-color Overheard in New York).

Chad laments that we don’t hear that much about the decathlon any more, because Americans aren’t really competitive. I also think it’s a shame, because any sport in which your score can be a complex number deserves more attention.

Yes, it’s true. The decathlon combines ten different track and field events, so to come up with a final score we need some way to tally up all of the individual scores so that each event is of approximately equal importance. You know what that means: an equation. Let’s imagine that you finish the 100 meter dash in 9.9 seconds. Then your score in that event, call it x, is x = 9.9. This corresponds to a number of points, calculated according to the following formulas:

points = α(x₀-x)^β   for track events,

points = α(x-x₀)^β   for field events.

That’s right — power laws! With rather finely-tuned coefficients, although it’s unclear whether they occur naturally in any compactification of string theory. The values of the parameters α, x₀ and β are different for each of the ten events, as this helpful table lifted from Wikipedia shows:

Event	α	x0	β	Units
100 m	25.437	18	1.81	seconds
Long Jump	0.14354	220	1.4	centimeters
Shot Put	51.39	1.5	1.05	meters
High Jump	0.8465	75	1.42	centimeters
400 m	1.53775	82	1.81	seconds
110 m Hurdles	5.74352	28.5	1.92	seconds
Discus Throw	12.91	4	1.1	meters
Pole Vault	0.2797	100	1.35	centimeters
Javelin Throw	10.14	7	1.08	meters
1500 m	0.03768	480	1.85	seconds

The goal, of course, is to get the most points. Note that for track events, your goal is to get a low score x (running fast), so the formula involves (x₀-x); in field events you want a high score (throwing far), so the formula is reversed, (x-x₀). Don’t ask me how they came up with those exponents β.

You might think the mathematics consultants at the International Olympic Committee could tidy things up by just using an absolute value, |x-x₀|^β. But those athletes are no dummies. If you did that, you could start getting great scores by doing really badly! Running the 100 meter dash in 100 seconds would give you 74,000 points, which is kind of unfair. (The world record is 8847.)

However, there remains a lurking danger. What if I did run a 100-second 100 meter dash? Under the current system, my score would be an imaginary number! 61237.4 – 41616.9i, to be precise. I could then argue with perfect justification that the magnitude of my score, |61237.4 – 41616.9i |, is 74,000, and I should win. Even if we just took the real part, I come out ahead. And if those arguments didn’t fly, I could fall back on the perfectly true claim that the complex plane is not uniquely ordered, and I at least deserve a tie.

Don’t be surprised if you see this strategy deployed, if not now, then certainly in 2012.

Via Sociological Images.

That’s why you should become scientists, kids! (Because engineers don’t have sex. You want me to spell it out for you?)

I really should just leave it at that, but the sprawling, multifaceted stupidity of this public service announcement — apparently having sex, like smoking the wacky weed, kills brain cells and will cripple your SAT scores, or something — is difficult to let pass without comment. The immaturity of our cultural attitudes toward sex is flat-out embarrassing. There are real concerns that adolescents should be taught about — disease and the risk of unwanted pregnancy being the obvious ones. But they should also be taught that, as long as you are careful about such things, there is nothing wrong with having sex. Done correctly, it can be fun! Sure, there can be emotional trauma, awkward moments, broken hearts, impetuous late-night phone calls that you wish you could take back the next day. But these are downsides associated with life, not with sex per se.

But as a society, we’re too uptight and hypocritical to say these things. Instead, we get stuff like abstinence-only sex ed, with predictable results. And adolescence, which isn’t going to be an easy time of life for most people no matter how much sensible advice they are given, becomes just that much more agonizing and uncertain.

Except for engineers, of course! They have it figured out.